Thursday, June 25, 2009

Over the past two years, I've had the opportunity to build relationships with e-learning colleagues that span my home province of Ontario. While I've greatly enjoyed working with online teachers and their support teams, it is in collaborating with provincial colleagues who share my role, that I've experienced the most insightful personal and professional growth.

Although we gathered in person only 10 times over the past 24 months, the Region e-Learning Contacts (ReLCs) took great advantage of modern communications technologies to build relationships and to collaborate in support of provincial school boards and school authorities.

As a testament to how close we've become, the ReLCs will be with me FORE a long time, thanks to a perfectly appropriate 'going away' gift!

In preparing for the challenges of my next professional role, I am very much looking forward to reconnecting with local colleagues. Only time will tell if we will be able to leverage professional networks as effectively as my ReLC colleagues and I have proven possible.

Tuesday, June 16, 2009

It's still very early after the launch of Opera Unite, but already, I'm seeing some logic to the idea of saving your personal documents and media files locally, instead of 'in the cloud'.

While it's always been possible to share files from your home computer through remote management tools, the engagement of a web browser as the conduit, may well bring content sharing to the masses. By installing and activating the Opera browser, anyone can host a meeting, publish resources, or share media files.

As the open source development community begins to imagine new applications for this browser, consider a future where any mobile device might have direct access to the files and programs on any other computer. Mobile, hyper-networked computing, might completely re-wire the nervous system of today's World Wide Web.

The brief overview provided to TechCrunch tells the opening chapter of what promises to be an ongoing story.

Questions to consider:Might traditional 'cloud computing' become less popular?Can software be accessed and run through this browsing technology?Why might we want to access our home files from handheld devices?How secure will the unshared files on my computer be?Will loopholes allow hackers to leverage our computers as drones?

And the big question on everyone's mind:Will 'Opera-tives' really pursue facial gestures as hinted on April 1st? ;-)

The potential of social media is being realized in telling the story of the election in Iran. Citizen journalists are using the tag #iranelection to create a historic blip on the World Wide Web. And by following the story, our trend-setting is telling the media which news is most important.

Wednesday, June 3, 2009

Earlier today, this tweet proved to be a thoughtful way to start the day...

The responses that trickled in through the morning lifted my spirits as I came to realize that a wide range of teachers do get it! I only wish more folks had been able to see the wide variety of posts that followed. Alas, Twitter's new 'replies policy' restricted live views to the few who are lucky enough to be following many of these Twitterers AND myself.

Next time, we'll use a #hashtag; until then, I hope you'll find these responses as uplifting as I do:

These are the types of classroom teachers I'd love to work with! At least, we can follow the continued learning of these round-the-world colleagues on Twitter.

If you missed out on the chance to respond in 140 characters, feel free to add your response below. Alternatively, you might choose to respond to the provoking followup questions contributed by @lmockford and @biggmaxx.

Other Stuff by Rodd

About Me

As a teacher; learner; consultant; speaker; and collaborator, I'm on the lookout for opportunities to engage in meaningful conversations with others who see themselves as learners. Professional development; project based learning; and Creative Commons are topics that are always on my radar.